US : CyberFund, Inc. announced that ROK Entertainment has successfully completed the world's first music concert to be streamed live over mass-market 2.5G via GPRS to mobile phones. ROK announced in May 2007 it had agreed to be acquired by CyberFund, Inc. in a Share Exchange Agreement and is in the midst of deploying its mobile TV services to more than 30 operators globally.

The 'Be My Guest' concert was staged on Saturday 14th July at the Bangkok Hall in Thailand and was streamed across a 4 hour period, live and exclusive, to mobile operator AIS's ROK TV service. It can be viewed at http://www.gsmadvance.com/t/services/news/be-my-guest-concert.aspx

Commenting on the breakthrough, Jonathan Kendrick, Chairman of ROK said, "Live events have been streamed over 3G networks before but never over 2.5G via GPRS, so we are delighted to have successfully set the tone -- and the model -- for this brand new mass-market mobile entertainment service, going forward."

In order to prevent any possible GPRS bandwidth capacity problems, AIS restricted the number of viewers able to access the stream at any one time to 4,000 people. Existing subscribers to ROK TV on AIS were asked to bid, via SMS, for an access code to watch the concert for free.

AIS reported a total of more than 15,000 people watched ROK TV on their mobiles on the day of the concert. Interestingly, the concert was staged during a torrential rainstorm in Bangkok, which disabled satellite TV for many people, yet the ROK TV stream over GPRS remained unaffected.

ROK TV on AIS was officially launched in May 2007 and currently has nearly 80,000 subscribers.

"We shall be replicating and building upon this initial success with AIS with more of our partner mobile operators worldwide and we're looking now for more key individual events to film and stream to mobile phones," added Kendrick. "After all, there are more screens on mobile phones worldwide than all the TV sets, all the computer screens and all the cinema screens combined, so we see streaming of live events to mobiles over existing 2.5G mobile networks as a major new media channel of the future."

In addition to deploying ROK TV to mobile operators, the service is also being marketed direct-to-consumer in conjunction with Nokia Eseries devices.